Selections Interview with Gayle Garrett, Project Director, U.S. News & World Report’s Best Graduate Schools Guide

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Selections: In terms of taking the starting salaries of students into account, does your rating system account for variation in salaries of people with different amounts of work experience or for people who accept jobs in various parts of the United States or in other countries, where salaries can be much different?
Garrett: Not yet. I think we would consider adding that if the Career Services Council gave us some guidance on that. What we do publish for any school is the geographic distribution for where the graduates are working. That information doesn’t factor into the ranking model, but if someone wants to look at a specific school that has very high salaries, they can look at the detailed information for a specific school on our Web site and they can see where the geographic concentrations are for people earning those salaries.

Selections: Do you rank international business schools?
Garrett: No. Why not? I know AACSB has now changed its name to highlight the fact that they are now accrediting international schools. So far we haven’t done that, and partly it is a resources issue. I don’t think if we got more resources we would put it toward that area, because we don’t really gather any. . . We have not tried to construct a model for part-time programs. And given the number of students who are enrolled in part-time programs, which really swamps the number who are going into international programs, we might try to work in that area if we were able to get more resources. Right now, the only kind of ranking that we can get comes from the deans and the program directors.

Selections: Where do you publish the results of your rankings?
Garrett: The rankings are published in the hardcover book America’s Best Graduate Schools. It costs $7.95, and it goes on sale at the beginning of April and stays on until the beginning of December. The results are published in the magazine at about the same time the guide comes out, so that would be at the beginning of April. The information is also published on our Web site, which is free right now.

Selections: Have you noticed any increase in magazine sales for your rankings issue?
Garrett: That is not information that we get as a matter of course. Bob may have more specific information on that. Certainly, we know the Web site gets a lot of hits the day that the rankings are released. Bob would have more information on those particular statistics.

Selections: How do you respond to the allegations out there that the rankings are, above all, just a way to sell more magazines?
Garrett: Well, I don’t know how many magazines we sell for the rankings issues. I do know that in the year 2000, the magazine cover that had the highest newsstand sales was the one that said, “Is the Bible True?” It was not a rankings issue. The other thing you have to realize is that U.S. News is not really a newsstand-driven publication. It is a subscription-based publication. But I really can’t say any more than that, because the newsstand sales figures are not circulated to us. I do know that point was made during one meeting last year. The rankings are something that U.S. News is identified with. It differentiates us from other news weeklies. However, I think the perception that the rankings are bringing enormous amounts of money into the U.S. News coffers is probably not that accurate.

Selections: How do you see rankings improving the business school admissions and selections process as well as improving management education overall?
Garrett: I don’t really know about the admissions and selections process, per se. I was speaking with the dean of an MBA program that is in our top 50. It is ranked between 26 and 53. The dean is very much involved with the AACSB and the Career Services Council. He spoke about how really important it is to get clearer salary data out there. And, specifically, the changes that I outlined to you about giving the numbers of students that go with the salary information. He really applauded that effort to make those changes this year and to get that information out in our publication and on our Web site. Because what it does is, if we put it out on our Web site, we can only put out what schools give us, and if it becomes apparent to a prospective student doing comparative work, if they see that school A gave us lots of detailed information and school B didn’t, then that person is apt to act on that information, either by going back to that school that didn’t give much information and asking why not, or saying, “Well, the school that did give more information is maybe to be more trusted.” So, what it does is provide a forum that reinforces the standards that the deans themselves, acting in the best interest of the profession, want to foster. Any dean always has to balance the effort to make his school come first with the effort to increase the standards that everyone in the group holds. At one point, I was trying to track down a mythical directory of MBA recruiters, because we go to each school and ask for data on names and contact information for their recruiters. I was told that everyone wants to see this kind of directory but no school wants to give away its information before another school does. So the kind of things that we do when we start publishing information on our Web site. . . It sort of ups the ante for all schools.

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